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Quotation

Rust

the Longest War
The people of the world go through 180 billion aluminum beverage cans a year. That’s four six-packs for every person on the planet. The United States and Canada gobble up more than half of them—100 billion a year—and Ball makes a third of these. (Two other companies make the majority of the rest.) === Consider a can of Coke. It’s a corrosion nightmare. Phosphoric acid gives it a pH of 2.75, salts and dyes render it still more aggressive, and the concoction exists under ninety pounds per square inch of pressure, trying to force its way out of a layer of aluminum a few thousandths of an inch thick. It sits there for weeks, months, years, often in a humid fridge, or dank pantry, or hot trunk, or stagnant warehouse. That the can doesn’t corrode is a technological marvel. That we are capable of reproducing that result hundreds of billions of times over—with a failure rate of 0.002 percent—is an unheralded corrosion miracle.